Turning Trust to Transactions: Tracking Affiliate Marketing and FTC Compliance in YouTube's Influencer Economy
YouTube has evolved into a powerful platform that where creators monetize their influence through affiliate marketing, raising concerns about transparency and ethics, especially when creators fail to disclose their…
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Key Takeaways
- Major industry investment.
- Although regulatory agencies like the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have issued guidelines to address these issues, non-compliance and consumer harm persist, and the extent of these problems…
What It Means
Context
Although regulatory agencies like the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have issued guidelines to address these issues, non-compliance and consumer harm persist, and the extent of these problems remains unclear. In this paper, Hugging Face Daily Papers introduces tools, developed with insights from recent advances in Web measurement and NLP research, to examine the state of the affiliate marketing ecosystem on YouTube. Hugging Face Daily Papers apply these tools to a 10-year dataset of 2 million videos from nearly 540,000 creators, analyzing the prevalence of affiliate marketing on YouTube and the rates of non-compliant behavior. Hugging Face Daily Papers's findings reveal that affiliate links are widespread, yet dis- closure compliance remains low, with most videos failing to meet FTC standards. Furthermore, Hugging Face Daily Papers analyze the effects of different stakeholders in improving disclosure behavior. Hugging Face Daily Papers's study suggests that the platform is highly associated with improved compliance through standardized disclosure features. Hugging Face Daily Papers recommend that regulators and affiliate partners collaborate with platforms to enhance…
For builders
Although regulatory agencies like the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have issued guidelines to address these issues, non-compliance and consumer harm persist, and the extent of these problems…
For Builders
Although regulatory agencies like the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have issued guidelines to address these issues, non-compliance and consumer harm persist, and the extent of these problems…